from the some-workout-ideas dept

For this week's awesome stuff post on interesting crowdfunding projects, I thought we'd look at some unique ideas that are trying to help people exercise more.

First up, we've got the amusingly named monkii bars, which are basically a set of two bars along with a suspension line, that makes it easy to create a set of hanging bars for a variety of different exercises that can be done on the go.

The project has far surpassed its funding goal of $25,000, so it will absolutely be funded. A basic set of the bars costs $98 (which seems a bit steep, but clearly plenty of people find it perfectly reasonable) during the crowdfunding campaign. An early bird price of $74 has long since sold out.

Next up, we've got the TAO device, which kind of looks too techie for its own good. It's a little electronic device that apparently lets you do resistance work outs just by holding the device and doing certain exercises that involve pushing the device. Frankly, the whole thing feels... flakey. It's not entirely clear how well it actually works. The company uses made up terms like "Variobic" (which they've trademarked), they hype up their patent... and the video... well, is kind of creepy. The way the guy eerily quotes the positive press coverage, comes off as bad TV pitchman, rather than anything all that compelling.

Perhaps that's why, despite all the glowing press they hype, the Kickstarter project only has about 10% of its goal of $100,000 with three and a half weeks to go. There are "early bird" devices available at $149, which they claim is "half price" but also recognize that the product isn't even scheduled to ship until the end of the year, and it's pretty rare for any Kickstarter project to ship on time anyway -- so it seems more likely that this is a year or so out from actually being a product.

Finally, we've got one where the product isn't an exercise device itself, but something that hopes to inspire people to get out and run. Rundercover is an "audio game" that is apparently supposed to make going for a regular run a bit more adventurous, by overlaying an adventure/set of missions on the process. The video is... incredibly lacking in showing any detail about how this actually works, unfortunately. The idea could be interesting, but from the video and the description, I basically have no idea what the actual final product will be like.

Perhaps because of the rather vague description, Rundercover only has raised about $3.5k of the $60,000 it was shooting for with a week and a half to go. It seems very unlikely it's going to hit that target.

That's it for this week. Even if none of the above is all that interesting, go out and get some exercise.